Their first four albums' CD remasters, 2002, from the Boston Phoenix
I once got into a small amount of trouble working at CBS Records from 1972 – 1974. Aerosmith was finally starting to break out of its hometown, Boston, and Columbia Records had a welcome home celebration concert March 9, 1974, at the Orpheum Theater. I was supposed to hype Aerosmith, of course, for the company house magazine Playback. But I slipped into rock critic mode and kind of suggested that Blue Öyster Cult dominated the doubleheader. (In fact, a year earlier, the two bands had been on the road together with Aerosmith sometimes the opening act.)
The product managers for the two groups wrote my boss a letter to remind us that CBS was not Creem, and that I had failed in my mission to focus the celebration on Aerosmith. It was no big deal, and point taken. About 25 years later, around 2000, I was living in New York doing mostly freelance food writing when the Boston Phoenix (and its sister weekly in Providence, Rhode Island) invited me to contribute, and I was happy to find an outlet for record reviews that would be seen by the Phoenix’s knowledgeable readership. This appeared in the Phoenix around Feb. 15, 2002 under the headline “Critical Mass: Blue Öyster Cult’s first four.”
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A heavy metal band for rock critics and our overeducated, underpaid cohort? A contradiction, perhaps. But that was the setup for Blue Öyster Cult. The group, whose first four albums have recently been reissued on CD by Sony/Legacy, were first known as Soft White Underbelly (SWU), a head trip of a band centered at the State University at Stony Brook in 1967, then the smartest and stonedest school in the New York State system. And even after a brief stint as the Stalk-Forrest Group, the personnel remained consistent: Eric Bloom, vocals, “stun” guitar, and keyboards; brothers Albert and Joseph Bouchard on drums and bass, respectively; Allen Lanier, rhythm guitar and keyboards; and Donald Roeser, better known as “Buck Dharma,” as lead guitarist. Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman produced the albums; David Lucas co-produced the first and fourth of the reissues. (In 2026, Bloom and Roeser are still touring as BÖC with other musicians.)
Two key lyricists affiliated with Soft White Underbelly, Stalk-Forrest, and then BÖC first staked their names in the influential, intellectual rock journal Crawdaddy: Pearlman and Richard Meltzer. A third lyricist, preceding her own rock star breakout, was poet Patti Smith, who I first interviewed when she was living at a posh Greenwich Village address with Allen Lanier. (Lanier died at 67 in 2013.)
Meltzer had part of his first book,,the dense but charming treatise The Aesthetics of Rock, excerpted in the Paul Williams-edited journal. Pearlman was the band’s field marshal. Although the umlaut above the Ö in Öyster was Lanier’s idea, it was Pearlman’s lyrics and production that helped define the group’s highbrow approach to heavy metal – he split the difference between Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild.” Pearlman can be credited with the Nietzschean cant that would recommend the band to its Kantian niche: fellow former philosophy students and rock-loving academics who understood BÖC’s black and red irony.
All four of the reissued discs 1972’s Blue Öyster Cult, 1973’s Tyranny and Mutation. 1974’s Secret Treaties. and 1976’s Agents of Fortune – are outfitted with bonus tracks and informative liner notes by Nuggets compiler Lenny Kaye. The lagniappe accompanying the first is especially tasty, comprising the four demos SWU recorded for Columbia in 1969. (Columbia didn’t bite, yet.) Three of the demos – “Donovan’s Monkey, “ “What Is Quicksand, “ and “A Fact About Sneakers “ – feature lyrics by Meltzer. These vibrantly-played tabs of musical mescaline share reconfigured Motown DNA (echoes of “Mickey’s Monkey,” “Quicksand,” and “High Heeled Sneakers“). The fourth, a cover of Bobby Freeman’s “Betty Lou’s Got a New Pair of Shoes,“ was conventional, more a Bob Seger Chevy truck than a Jefferson Airplane.
The first three BÖC albums have always lacked the diabolical sonic fullness, the rocket power the band clearly had in their heads, with the chops to pull it off. The reason was an archaic rule that required CBS Records artists to record at the Columbia studios with union engineers, rooms designed for big-band orchestras and Broadway original-cast show recordings, not post-atomic rock and roll. The reissues, at least, give back the bottom end the devil intended this music to have. Agents of Fortune was recorded at the Record Plant in New York, and then, as now, you can hear the difference.
Nevertheless, BÖC did arrive fully formed with “Transmaniacon MC, “ the first track on the first album. Feeding off paranoid visions of Hell’s Angels at Altamont, of motorcycles, weapons, drugs, and human sacrifice, came a credo – “We’re pain, we’re steel, a plot of knives!“ – that was mock-Shakespearean in its grandeur. That intensity and the roar of the guitars is sustained from beginning to end, especially on “Stairway to the Stars“ (Meltzer lyrics) and “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll“ (by Buck and Albert). Visionary reinforcement arrives on Tyranny and Mutation in the person of Patti Smith, the poet first heard in a rock-and-roll context here, as co-writer of the song “Baby Ice Dog.”
BÖC never achieved total rock-star status. Efficient and competent, Eric Bloom was no Ozzy Osbourne or Alice Cooper on stage; he was a professional when the audience wanted cartoon frontmen. And the band’s occasional sidesteps into boogie guitar solos onstage confused headbanger teens, who were used to condescension from their loud heroes, not a working band’s respect.
Still, the work on Secret Treaties and Agents of Fortune was not merely solid. Great numbers step out of the pack: Treaties’ “Career of Evil “ had unfulfilled singles potential, and the band’s best-known song, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper,” from Fortune, peaked at Number 12 on the Billboard charts. But by 1976, the slick, nonthreatening, unambiguous rock of Boston had audiences clamoring for “More Than a Feeling,” not BÖC’s crypt-kicking shtick. Rock radio was the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Peter Frampton. BÖC continued for years, but on these four CDs, they were at their best, their brightest, and their darkest.
© 2002, 2026 Wayne Robins. This article is reprinted from Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins writes the Critical Conditions Substack: https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Eric Meola, Columbia Records.
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